The Wanderer’s Descent

2019 ◽  
pp. 147-200
Author(s):  
Judith Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
Jewish Refugee ◽  
Demeter And Persephone ◽  
Ancient Texts

Chapter 4 outlines how a descent to the underworld can symbolize experiences of diasporic populations, including refugees, enslaved peoples, exiles, and immigrants. An African-American man in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon experiences an Odyssean Nekyia, and connects with his family’s past. Amy Bloom’s Away makes parallels between the story of a Jewish refugee to America and the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet features Orpheus as a rock star whose descent is structured as a passage from India to America. Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder refers to the Orpheus story to address issues of deracination, but also suggests deeper intertexts that invite a critique of corporate plundering of the Amazon. With deliberate citations of ancient texts, these authors exploit the dialectic between home and the underworld to explore issues of diaspora, immigration, exile, assimilation, and nostalgia.

scholarly journals The Experience of Alienation in Toni Morrison’s Work: Man’s Fragmentation and Concomitant Distortion

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Mohammed Mahameed ◽  
Majed Abdul Karim
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Work

The question of alienation has always been a pervasive theme in the history of modern thought, and it occupies a considerable place in contemporary work. Literature in general, and fiction in particular, raise this issue to reveal its influence on human beings and communities. Novelists have been trying to unravel its complexities and concomitant consequences. The paper aims to explore the experience of alienation through depicting the issue not as a purely racial reality, or something restricted to the colour of the skin or gender of the victim. It is rather presented as a distressing state which cripples the victims and makes them susceptible captives of the dominant forces. In the selected novels, Toni Morrison has delved deep into the experience of alienation through her male and female characters, showing the different forms of this experience. The present research investigates Morrison’s portrayal of the issue from an African-American prospect. References will be made to novels such as Tar Baby, Sula, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.

Toni Morrison’s Shulamites

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilana Pardes
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
Love Poem ◽  
The Many

This chapter focuses on Toni Morrison’s renditions of new Shulamites in Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987). The female characters of both novels highlight the power and bold eroticism of the Shulamite’s voice, calling for a different perception of gender relations and feminine sexuality. While offering new representations of femininity, Morrison is no less eager to fashion a new grand Song as a base for a redefinition of the African-American community. In Song of Solomon, the ancient biblical love poem merges with African folk songs and legends and in Beloved, the ghostly Beloved is both a tormented and tormenting Shulamite as well as the spirit of the many slaves whose sufferings she embodies. Special attention is given to Morrison’s response to African-American commentaries on the verse ‘I am black, but comely’ and to points of affinity between her exegesis and feminist biblical criticism in the 1970s and 1980s.

Specters on Staircases in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

2020 ◽  
pp. 100-127
Author(s):  
Sarah Gilbreath Ford
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
African American Woman ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Women's Status ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
White Families ◽  
Women’S Status ◽  
The Past ◽  
Delta Wedding

This chapter examines parallel scenes in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (1946), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), where a character rushes into a haunted house seeking to climb the stairs only to be thwarted by a seemingly supernatural African American woman. These scenes signify the women’s contradictory roles as powerless property and powerful specters. Treated as property, the women do not just haunt the houses, they haunt as houses; they are conflated with the legal property of white families, even after the end of slavery. The women’s status as housekeepers, however, allows them a “keeping,” or possession of property, that provides them the power as specters to block the outsiders, who want to transgress the boundary of time to travel back into the past. Legal possession established by property rights confronts spectral possession signified by haunting.

scholarly journals “Breathing the Air of a World So New”: Rewriting the Landscape of America in Toni Morrison's A Mercy

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER TERRY
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New World ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
Dominant Discourses

This article explores Toni Morrison's preoccupation with, and reimagining of, the landscape of the so-called New World. Drawing on scholarship that has investigated dominant discourses about freedom, bounty, and possibility located within the Americas, it identifies various counternarratives in Morrison's fiction, tracing these through the earlier Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), but primarily arguing for their centrality to A Mercy (2008). The mapping of seventeenth-century North America in the author's ninth novel both exposes colonial relations to place and probes African American experiences of the natural world. In particular, A Mercy is found to recalibrate definitions of “wilderness” with a sharpened sensitivity to the position of women and the racially othered within them. The dynamic between the perspectives towards the environment of Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob Vaark and Native American orphan and servant Lina, is examined, as well as the slave girl Florens's formative encounters in American space. Bringing together diverse narrative views, A Mercy is shown to trouble hegemonic settler and masculinist notions of the New World and, especially through Florens's voicing, shape an alternative engagement with landscape. The article goes some way towards meeting recent calls for attention to the intersections between postcolonial approaches and ecocriticism.

scholarly journals A Study on the Postmodern Narrative Features in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Miaomiao WANG ◽  
Chengqi LIU
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Future Development ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
Narrative Conventions

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is renowned as the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. Her third novel Song of Solomon was written in the context of postmodernism, which embodies a variety of postmodern narrative features. Postmodern works are frequently inclined to ambiguity, anarchism, collage, discontinuity, fragmentation, indeterminacy, metafiction, montage, parody, and pluralism. Such postmodern narrative features as parody, metafiction and indeterminacy have been manifested in Song of Solomon. In this novel, Toni Morrison employs the strategy of parody in order to subvert traditional narrative modes and overthrow the western biblical narrative as well as African mythic structure. Meta-narratives are also used in the text to dissolve the authority of the omniscient and omnipotent narrator. By questioning and criticizing the traditional narrative conventions, Morrison creates a fictional world with durative indeterminacy and unanswered problems. Through presenting parody, metafiction and indeterminacy, this paper attempts to analyze the postmodern narrative features in Song of Solomon and further explore Morrison’s writing on the African-American community and its future development.

Specters on Staircases

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Sarah Gilbreath Ford
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
American Women ◽  
Delta Wedding ◽  
The Status ◽  
Haunted Houses

In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters enter haunted houses seeking information only to be confronted on the stairs by mysterious African American women. This essay explores what is at stake in the portrayals of African American specters standing on staircases and impeding other characters’ desire for knowledge. The gothic energy driving the repetition is the conflation of person and property that happens in slavery, causing these women not just to haunt the houses but to haunt as houses, as the status of property they were assigned because of their race. While this status renders the women in one sense powerless, each uses her situation as property to assert a different kind of possession, thereby becoming powerful specters. As property, the women testify to the horror of slavery. As specters, the women reveal how that horror haunts the present.

The Flowers Are Vexed

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Imani Perry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Feminist Jurisprudence ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
Anglo American

This work, at the intersection of feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, and African American literary studies, challenges the concept of the reasonable man which informs Anglo-American jurisprudence. The argument revolves around a politics of relation that challenges the hierarchies of membership that are an integral part to the development of the American legal order. The chapter draws on Hortense Spillers’s germinal concept of vestibularity (standing at the threshold) as well as Stanley Cavell’s concept of the “passionate utterance” to furnish alternatives to the reasonable man. It concludes with readings of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.

Buried perspectives

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Terry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
North American ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Historical Structures ◽  
The North ◽  
American Landscape ◽  
Dominant Discourses

In examining representations of engagements with the North American landscape in the fiction of Toni Morrison, this article seeks to explore the author’s revision of dominant discourses about the topography and symbolic spaces of the continent and her exposure thereby of historical structures of power. Focusing on her fourth novel, Song of Solomon (1977), it traces how Morrison attempts to give voice to African American experience and identity and to revisit and contest familiar stories of national belonging and being in the land. In crafting tales of black displacement, dispossession, estrangement, travel, discovery, connection and home, the author is found to excavate buried perspectives and shape her own potent narrative act.

The Hearing Aid Effect in African American and Caucasian Males as Perceived by Female Judges of the Same Race

1999 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Davis ◽  
Rhonda Jackson ◽  
Tina Smith ◽  
William Cooper
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hearing Aids ◽  
Undergraduate Education ◽  
Hearing Aid ◽  
Semantic Differential ◽  
Semantic Differential Scale ◽  
Education Majors ◽  
Female Undergraduate ◽  
Lay Persons ◽  
Males And Females

Prior studies have proven the existence of the "hearing aid effect" when photographs of Caucasian males and females wearing a body aid, a post-auricular aid (behind-the-ear), or no hearing aid were judged by lay persons and professionals. This study was performed to determine if African American and Caucasian males, judged by female members of their own race, were likely to be judged in a similar manner on the basis of appearance, personality, assertiveness, and achievement. Sixty female undergraduate education majors (30 African American; 30 Caucasian) used a semantic differential scale to rate slides of preteen African American and Caucasian males, with and without hearing aids. The results of this study showed that female African American and Caucasian judges rated males of their respective races differently. The hearing aid effect was predominant among the Caucasian judges across the dimensions of appearance, personality, assertiveness, and achievement. In contrast, the African American judges only exhibited a hearing aid effect on the appearance dimension.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document